The Saudis Try to Navigate the Space-Time Continuum
While the Saudi King tries to bring Saudi Arabia into the 19th century, his Crown Prince wants to take it back to the 7th:
The Saudi kingdom increasingly reveals its internal contradictions, but they seldom have the public impact, or worldwide media coverage, of the opposition protests in Iran. As noted more than two years ago in THE WEEKLY STANDARD here, King Abdullah has tried to hold the “morals patrols” accountable for their wild, vigilante-like assaults on members of the public, and Saudi media have repeatedly proclaimed that the mutawiyin would receive training intended to ameliorate their tendencies toward sadism. Each time such measures are announced, Crown Prince Nayef pushes back, and the mutawiyin seem to emerge with more power and impunity than before.
It has, nevertheless, been a busy season for the reformers and enemies of reform in Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of October King Abdullah dismissed Saad Nasser Bin Abdel Aziz Al-Shethri, a leading Wahhabi cleric, from the country’s supreme theological body, the Senior Council of Religious Scholars. Al-Shethri had assailed the King’s favorite project, the multi-billion dollar King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), which opened in September near Jeddah. The university, which was built independently of the clerical hierarchy, provoked Wahhabi condemnation because it will include mixed-gender classes; women will not be required to wear face veils (niqab) and may even drive on the 15 square-mile campus. In addition, the mutawiyin are barred from its grounds. Al-Shethri demanded that sharia commissions be introduced inside the university to examine its curriculum and practices for deviations from Wahhabi norms. But while hardline clerics and their supporters begged for Nayef to intervene and criticize the “corruption” of the new university, Nayef remained silent. Even he cannot, it seems, openly attack the university project, which is so clearly protected by the king. Some Saudis believe, however, that a counter-blow to the university will inevitably come.
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